Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible • Hacker News Board

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#901

Post by sean0- » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:18 PM UTC

Supposedly this feature is being walked back now. I just received the following from their support. I'm ecstatic to hear this and hope their Product Management has reassessed the importance of non-WYSIWYG inputs.

>>> We really appreciate your feedback, and we hear your frustration. We're sorry for the impact this is having on your ability to communicate with your team and on your overall productivity. We made a mistake by forcing everyone into this feature without providing an opt-out for customers like you: people for whom the existing behavior was working just fine. We've started working on a preference that will let you return to the previous message composer. We don't have a specific release date to share right now — it's this team's top and only priority, however, and we expect to have it available on the desktop within a couple of weeks, with Android following shortly thereafter. We will follow up with another note when this option is available to you, and we'll include instructions on how to enable it. Again, we're sorry for the disruption and we're grateful for the feedback. We missed the mark on this feature! We will do our best to learn from this and avoid similar mistakes in the future.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#902

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:26 PM UTC

asdf21 wrote: post #719

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason the Windows 95 interface was so much better than what came before it was because Microsoft did loads of user testing and changed their design heavily based on it.

And imo it's still basically the best design. 98 and XP were basically just flavors of win95 and those were everyone's favorite, UI wise.

I completely agree. There have been some improvements in the design (XP and Vista's Start Menu changes, XP and 7's Task Bar changes) but they're incremental ones, and Microsoft's attempts at big changes have not gone well.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#903

Post by mdaniel » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:27 PM UTC

riffraff wrote: post #895

ravedave5 wrote: post #844

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Join the hundreds of people complaining in this twitter thread, I put my beef with it in there too. https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1135955676545585164

You can send it directly via /feedback, too. It gets read, and you'll get an answer too.

I complain via my company's slack so they know the observation is from a paying customer

Don't get me wrong, the "you'll get an answer" is almost always the same "thank you for your input" but at least it creates a Zendesk ticket from a paying customer, in contrast to whining on HN or Twitter, where I am about dead certain no corporate OKR is influenced

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#904

Post by aclelland » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:28 PM UTC

sean0- wrote: post #901

Supposedly this feature is being walked back now. I just received the following from their support. I'm ecstatic to hear this and hope their Product Management has reassessed the importance of non-WYSIWYG inputs. >>> We really appreciate your feedback, and we hear your frustration. We're sorry for the impact this is having on your ability to communicate with your team and on your overall productivity. We made a mista…

Just for anyone who'd like some confirmation of this. Their official Twitter account it's also saying the same[1]

I'm glad they listened to the feedback but their attitude towards people who wrote in with bugs/criticism should also be learned from. Being told 'We know what's best for you, we're not reverting the changes' was pretty insulting.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/119764013617293721...

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#905

Post by mdaniel » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:28 PM UTC

pulse7 wrote: post #539

jschuur wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can exit a code block by hitting Command Option Shift C. I found this out by hovering over the code block icon in the bar below the editor box. The trick seems to be to add a blank final line, otherwise, it will not include the last line you typed in a code block.

So in other words: you still need to be "tech savvy" to do this...

Only if you care about that level of specificity of the results; and given that non-technical people love pasting code snippets into slack without the code fences, I'm guessing this change isn't even wanted by non-technical people, and only made detail-oriented folks upset

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#906

Post by songzme » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:35 PM UTC

it33 wrote: post #891

Mattermost CEO here. In my mind Slack’s target persona is no longer an engineer (if it ever was) - It is more likely a less tech savvy person who wants a WYSIWYG editor for rich text inputs. For what it’s worth, Mattermost is an open source alternative built for engineers by engineers. The interface is markdown.

Been using a self hosted version of Mattermost for our students as a main form of communication and the markdown support is something I absolutely love. Thanks.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#907

Post by dagss » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:35 PM UTC

Roark66 wrote: post #472

aero142 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet a lot of money I already know the pitch. It's the same one that the Confluence PM I'm sure made. "We have done very well selling to technical programmers and hip startups, but the market is so much bigger. shows Office 365 revenue numbers vs Slack revenue numbers . We have an opportunity to take this to the next level. We need to make this the goto office communication platform. cheers . Markdown may seem…

>I would bet a lot of money I already know the pitch. It's the same one that the Confluence PM I'm sure made. "We have done very well selling to technical programmers and hip startups, but the market is so much bigger. shows Office 365 revenue numbers vs Slack revenue numbers. We have an opportunity to take this to the next level. We need to make this the goto office communication platform. cheers. You're probably ri…

How would MS stop anyone from integrating with AD?

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#908

Post by mdaniel » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:37 PM UTC

Aaronstotle wrote: post #850

tbabb wrote: post #111

This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor. In both cases, I get that some users can't or don't like to use a machine grammar/markup, however simple. For some people markup is bad UX. Give them a WYSIWYG; that's fine. But don't remove the markup editor if your WYSIWYG editor is anything but a perfect one-two-one replacement for markup (and I have never seen one that satisfies that). IIRC there was a time…

Confluence/Jira is the worst product suite I've ever had the misfortune of using, I can't fathom how it became popular or who finds it useful.

Elsewhere in this thread is the HIPPO acronym, and that's how one ends up with Jira/Confluence: "no one got fired for buying it" combined with "pointy haired bosses love it"

It's been my overwhelming experience that managers love the _idea_ of Jira, but then the day-to-day in the trenches experience of battling its workflow, its markup, its ... everything ... gets pushed down onto busy people, and even if enough engineers revolt, now you have a "well, we're already so committed to Jira we can't leave now" style reply (again, in my experience)

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#909

Post by vlasev » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:42 PM UTC

gwd wrote: post #597

netsharc wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we start calling it the WYTIWYG (What you type isn't what you get) editor...

We need to distinguish "is" and "isn't". Maybe WYTAWYG (What You Type Ain't What You Get)?

Well... WYTINWYG should do it

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#910

Post by mdaniel » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

somebodythere wrote: post #187

jdoliner wrote: post #155

I've been suffering from this one too so I'll share the most annoying part for me. I frequently have reasons to type out glob patterns generally in backticks. The interface for this is completely broken in the new WYSIWYG editor. Here's what happens when I try to type: `/ / `, things work normally up until the second " " at which point the "/" between them becomes gets bolded, which makes no sense, because you can't…

There's some delicious irony in those slashes getting swallowed by HN's markdown parser.

HN does not use markdown, otherwise a lot more formatting would work; it's four leading spaces to code block something, and asterisks for italics, and that's it AFAIK